Instrumental case

The
instrumental case
(abbreviatedINS
or INSTR) is a
grammatical case
used to indicate that a noun is the instrument
or means by or with which the subject
achieves or accomplishes an action. The noun may be either a physical object or an abstract concept.

The instrumental case is notably used in Russian, where the case is called
творительный падеж (tvoritel'nyj padež). In most declension paradigms, the instrumental case in Russian can generally be distinguished by the -ом ("-om") suffix for most masculine and neuter nouns, the -ою/-oй ("-oju"/"-oj") suffix for most feminine nouns and -ами ("-ami") for any of the three genders in the plural.

Just as in English the preposition "with" can express instrumental ("using, by means of"), comitative ("in the company of"), and a number of other semantic relations, the instrumental case in Russian is not limited to its instrumental thematic role. It is also used to denote:

a predicate with infinitive, future tense, imperative, conditional and gerund of the verbs "быть" and "являться" (both meaning 'to be') (for example, "я хочу быть врачом", "не будь трусом" translate as "I want to be a doctor" and "don't be a coward", with the nouns in the instrumental case).

a predicate with a number of other verbs, denoting state, appearance, manner, consideration, etc.

parts of the day, seasons of the year, and some other temporal relations. For example, the sentence "я работаю утром" (ja rabotaju utrom) means "I work in the morning". The word утро (utro, "morning") in its instrumental case denotes the time in which the action (in the case of this example, "working") takes place ("in the morning").

similarity. For example, the phrases "выть волком," "умереть героем," "лететь стрелой" (to howl like a wolf, to die like a hero, to fly like an arrow) use nouns in the instrumental case.

The Russian instrumental case is also used with verbs of use and control (to own, to manage, to abuse, to rule, to possess, etc.), attitude (to be proud of, to threaten (with), to value, to be interested (in), to admire, to be obsessed (with), etc.), reciprocal action (to share, to exchange), and some other verbs.

Though the instrumental case does not exist in many languages, some languages use other cases to denote the means, or instrument, of an action. In
Classical Greek, for example, the
dative case
is used as the instrumental case. This can be seen in the sentence "..με κτείνει δόλῳ," or "..me ktenei dolôi" (Book IX, line 407 of the
Odyssey), which means "he kills me with a bait". Here, "δόλῳ," the dative of "δόλος" ("dolos" - a bait) is used as the instrumental case (the means or instrument here is, obviously, the bait). In Latin the instrumental case has merged with the
ablative, thus the ablative case has the same functions. For example,
ipso facto
can be translated as "by the fact itself", while oculīs vidēre
means "to see with one's eyes".

In Modern
English, the word
why
is one instance of an etymologically instrumental declension. Though not commonly known to be of
pronominal
origin, it was, in fact, inherited from Old Englishhwȳ, which was the declension of
hwæt
(now what) in the Old English instrumental case – a grammatical feature rare even in Old English. The modern instrumental case (as present in
why) does not bear the meaning of instrument, but of purpose, cause, or reason: rather, the closely related form
how
is used to express instrument, way, or means.

The functions of the
Proto-Indo-European
instrumental case were taken over by the dative, so that the Greek dative has functions belonging to the Proto-Indo-European dative, instrumental, and
locative.[2]
This is the case with the bare dative, and the dative with the preposition σύνsýn
"with". It is possible, however, that Mycenean Greek had the instrumental case, which was later replaced by dative in all the Greek dialects.[3]

While
Old High German
possessed a rudimentary instrumental case, its function was replaced with the dative in Middle High German, comparable with English and Ancient Greek, with a construction of "mit" (with) + dative clause (in English, the objective case is used). For example:

In this language, instrumental is used for actions done by objects and isn't necessery, but action done with people are limited only to this case. In this form prefix is most commonly used, but isn't necessery.

Pesnica (Fist)→s pesnicom (with a fist)

Udariti s pesnicom (Hit with a fist) and Udariti pesnicom (Hit with a fist)

Actions done with objects can exclude this case.

In this form case is required.

Mina (female name)→sa Minom (with Mina)

Ilija(male name)

Ilija izlazi sa Minom (Ilija is going out with Mina)

and opposite

Mina izlazi sa Ilijom (Mina is going out with Ilija)

All female names in this case lose last letter "a" (All Serbian female names end with "a") and get suffix "om".

The instrumental case is present in the
Hungarian language, where it serves several purposes. The main purpose is the same as the above, i.e. the means with which an action occurs. It has a role in the
-(t)at-causative
form of verbs, that is, the form of a verb that shows the subject caused someone else to action the verb. In this sense, the instrumental case is used to mark the person that was caused to execute the action expressed by the verb. It is also used to quantify or qualify words such as 'better' or 'ago', such as sokkal jobban
'much better' (literally 'with-much better'); hét évvel ezelőtt
'seven years ago' (literally 'seven with-years before this').

Finnish
has a historic, marginal instructive case
(-n), but in practice the
adessive case
(-lla/-llä) is used instead outside lexicalised fixed expressions, even though the adessive literally means 'on top', e.g.
vasaralla
'using a hammer' (instrumental meaning) or 'on a hammer' (locative meaning). (Vasaroin
'using hammers' is plausible and understandable, but not common in use.)

Nahuatl
uses the suffix -tica
to indicate the instrumental case. For example in the sentence ātlān ācaltica in huāllahqueh
'they came on the water by boat', ācalli
means 'boat' and ācaltica
means 'by (use of a) boat'.

Turkish
uses the conjunction ile
("with"), and its suffixed form -(y)lA
(realised as -(y)la
or -(y)le, depending on the dominant vowel of the noun—see
vowel harmony) to indicate the instrumental case. For example, in the sentence
Arabayla geldi
'he came by (the use of a) car', araba
means 'car' and arabayla
means 'by (the use of a) car, with a car'.

The original
Proto-Turkic
instrumental case suffix was -n, which is less
productive
today but is preserved in common words like yazın
("during the summer"), kışın
("during the winter"), öğlen
("at noon"), and yayan
("by foot", "on foot"). It became less productive in most Oghuz Turkic
languages. The conjunction ile
("with") in Turkish has semantically expanded to fill the gap (kürek ile
or kürekle, meaning "with the shovel" > "using the shovel"), being used as an instrumental marker, and the suffix
-(y)lA
(-le,
-la,
-yle,
-yla) is a form of
ile
which has been grammaticalized into an agglutinative suffix as a result of quick speech, becoming an enclitic.